The president of Sojourners, Adam Russell Taylor, is prophetically optimistic about what might emerge from the rubble of this fractious, darkening time. As he pondered what’s going on, he drew from what he learned in the 1990’s from South Africans, especially Desmond Tutu. He faced the question: “Will we meet the opportunity of this Kairos moment like they did?” You are probably asking your own questions – or avoiding them.
A kairos moment is the perfect, critical, or opportune time to say or do a particular thing. The ancient Greek concept of kairos is a qualitative kind of time, which is different from the quantitative, linear concept of chronos. In a kairos moment, like Taylor says we are in, the weight and meaning of the situation matter more than the duration. We tend to sense a kairos moment when we run into it, if we are aware enough. We respond to one rather than create one.
I was also in South Africa in the 90’s, not long after I came to Philadelphia to help plant Circle of Hope [link to the book]. The Philadelphia Leadership Foundation recruited members from its ranks to create a multiethnic mediation team to apply some skills to bridging what divides our city. We travelled to South Africa to learn from the experts. Unfortunately, our time with Tutu was cancelled because he was an important guy and needed more elsewhere.
We did not become an ongoing force for change as a group, but I know we carried some great lessons to apply to our individual situations when the time was right. The church and the dreamers in the world have spent a lot of time since the 90’s filling our minds and hearts with a yearning for justice and equality. They have salted the Earth and made a difference. Maybe more of what they planted is about to come up at just the right time, right now. I think we could see some fruit when millions of young people around the world took to the streets this year to demand an end to the mass killing of Gazans. Trump is flying to the Middle East to take credit for a cease fire deal. But millions of people caring for the poor and oppressed was what really turned the tide. And one day all that caring applied to the rest of what is being broken will win the day after the oligarchs and their enablers are dust — or so Taylor and I hope.
Here is part of what Adam Russell Taylor wrote in an editorial for Sojourners last week.
I first learned about the theological concept of kairos while studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa in 1996. South African faith leaders taught me that, as compared to chronos, or time as we know it and traditionally experience it, kairos moments are precipitated by times in which our current reality becomes so pernicious and fraudulent that God can create a moment of opportunity for propitious action and transformation.
As I think about the alarming things we’ve seen in the U.S. this year—eviscerated foreign aid, a gutted federal workforce, tax cuts for the 1% at the expense of Medicaid and food stamps, National Guard troops deployed against U.S. cities, indiscriminate immigration raids, an almost complete retreat on addressing our climate crisis, attacks on media outlets and free speech, and other tactics that mirror authoritarian regimes—I’m increasingly sensing that we are in the midst of a kairos moment. Further signs came to a head this past week with the horror of five mass shootings in one weekend, a costly government shutdown, and an alarming and bizarre summoning of 800 generals and admirals to the White House in which President Donald Trump pledged to dangerously misuse the military to come after the “enemy from within.”
We are not the first nation or the first Christians to face a kairos moment. In July 1985, South Africa was in an even deeper crisis. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency and dramatically escalated mass detentions, repression, and state violence while cracking down on the media. Despite growing international opposition, the apartheid state was doubling down on its repression. Many church leaders in South Africa, especially in the Dutch Reformed Church, misused and weaponized the Bible to justify the apartheid system of racial separation and oppression. Meanwhile, many other Christians remained silent and complacent in the face of increasing repression, staying on the sidelines of the anti-apartheid struggle.
In response, a group of South African church leaders, theologians, and Christian activists gathered to pen the Kairos Document, an open-ended document of faith-inspired resistance to apartheid. Its authors critiqued “state theology,” which they defined as Christianity that justifies “the status quo with its racism, capitalism, and totalitarianism” and “blesses injustice, canonizes the will of the powerful and reduces the poor to passivity, obedience, and apathy.” They also critiqued factions of the church who accepted the argument that the South African government’s repression was justified to maintain law and order, as well as those within the church who pleaded for racial reconciliation without first attending to injustice.
“We are a divided Church precisely because not all the members of our Churches have taken sides against oppression,” wrote the authors. “Unity and reconciliation within the Church itself is only possible around God and Jesus Christ who are to be found on the side of the poor and the oppressed.” [Full article]
That weed-strewn kairos
For thirty years I have been inspired by the faithfulness and tenacity of the people who led the movement to overturn apartheid in South Africa and build a new nation. I don’t think their vision had a long shelf life, after Mandela. But their improved nation still chugs along. And the seeds of justice and people power they planted have grown into several generations of people who can’t be easily turned by more promises built on the lies of power-hungry men.
We’ll see what the seeds planted in the U.S. finally become when the sunshine of this kairos moment dawns on them. It could be amazing. People like Adam Russell Taylor, Desmond Tutu and probably you will feel the urge to sprout from the rubble like plucky spiritual weeds always do.
